Reviews

Circa Magazine, 2009

This exhibition has no title. All twentytwo paintings are in diptych format. Keown paints a copy either of a photograph or of a painting and hinges it to an abstract field.1 Fields aver themselves to be gray, blue, black, red etc. On closer observation murmuring layers of tones both do and do not submit to the dominant hue. The abstract field in turn issues out of the figurative part of the diptych, eg the field attached to Fra Angelico’s Massacre of the innocents (1451 – 53) is the colour of the dresses of two mothers whose gestures are highly evocative. Read this review »

Aidan Dunne, 2007

Mary Theresa Keown, whose Quarry Paintings are showing at the Solomon Gallery, is an unfailingly interesting, thoughtful painter. She has been consistently interested in the mechanics of representation, the way images are constructed and perceived, and she takes her concerns much further in her latest work. Along one exploratory trail, she uses fragile expanses of dry powdered pigment to signify not so much the physical properties of the paint medium as the tacitly fabricated nature of images.Read this review »